The present invention relates generally to call center management operations and more specifically to simulation operations relating to call center operations, where the simulations account for a virtual queuing of customer calls.
Call centers receive calls from numerous customers. The high volume of calls often necessitates the use of call queues in which the customers must wait until an agent of the call center is available to assist the caller. However, in call systems utilizing virtual queuing, a customer may opt to receive a call back from an agent of the call center instead of waiting on the phone. If so, the call remains in the queue of the call center, but the customer may disconnect from the call. When the customer's call reaches the head of the queue, the call center calls the customer back and connects the customer to an agent. As such, in typical virtual queuing systems, each call is queued either normally (i.e., the customer waits on the line) or virtually (i.e., the customer is called back). Such functionality occurs completely within the call center and may require additional devices, components, software, and structure to provide the virtual queuing functionality.
Customer service interactions and call center activities are major cost factors for companies. These call centers are both essential to managing customers, but also relate directly to customer relations and satisfaction. Call centers themselves seek operation as maximum efficiency for not only solving the concerns of the customer, but also for managing staffing of service agents. A company seeks to find an economic medium between the staffing of call centers and managing customer expectations for service operations.
Staffing analytics and call management systems seek to optimize the staffing requirements of call centers, but these existing systems fail to account for virtual queuing techniques. Thus, a call center that utilizes a virtual queue or seeks to understand operational optimization with a virtual queue cannot use the existing simulation or optimization software. These call centers are then unable to better approximate or estimate the staffing requirements throughout various time intervals.
Therefore, there exists a need for workforce management and planning systems to be able to account for virtual queuing and incorporate the effects of virtual queuing in the software simulation operations.